Case Study

Policy Co-Creation for Children’s Rights

How can policy co-creation support the unique needs of communities in regions of great diversity?

Policymaking is typically a process that happens in capital cities behind closed doors, close to academics, lobbyists, and other “experts”, but far from the communities those policies are meant to serve. Where access is lacking, no amount of good intention guarantees inclusivity—or a policy’s effectiveness. This is especially true in Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN), an area populated by a variety of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures that speak different languages, practice different religions, and have distinct lived experiences. For policymakers in RAAN, supporting the needs of these communities demanded a fresh approach.

In partnership with the government of RAAN, and with UNICEF’s support, Reboot facilitated a policy co-creation program aimed at securing the rights of children across RAAN’s different communities. We led government officials through a series of participatory design exercises to cultivate an empathetic understanding of their constituents’ needs and yield the fresh insights necessary to craft appropriate policy responses. The program enabled the government of RAAN to develop a Regional Policy for Children that embraces and supports the diverse cultural heritages of the region.

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Nicaragua has made great strides toward improving the lives of its children in recent years. But these gains have not been realized universally. In RAAN, one of the country’s poorest regions, a stagnant economy, poor infrastructure, the lingering effects of natural disasters, and sociocultural complexity all conspire to challenge children’s healthy growth and development. Approximately one-third of the region’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition. On a host of human development indicators related to education, sanitation, and more, RAAN’s children are less well-served than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

Regional leaders are committed to closing this gap. Since 2011, they have been working to develop a Regional Policy for Children, which will serve as a framework to guide programmatic interventions that protect and empower children in RAAN. Recognizing that the diversity of the region required a deeper appreciation of their constituents, the regional government, with the support of UNICEF, engaged Reboot to help facilitate a program of policy co-creation. Specifically, officials in RAAN and UNICEF sought Reboot’s support to demonstrate how tools and techniques of participatory design could inform the policymaking process.

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From the outset, we placed regional policymakers in the driver’s seat. The reasons were twofold: to expose policymakers directly to the lived experiences of RAAN’s children; and to ensure they felt confident with the tools and techniques of participatory design to continue this approach independently in future policymaking exercises.

Select services for this project included:

Design Research

Through a series of community consultations, ethnographic interviews, service trials, and observation exercises, we helped immerse regional policymakers and UNICEF staff in the context of their communities. They interacted with over 300 citizens in all nine territories of RAAN. Their activities included shadowing a young single mother, attending public and private school, spending a night at a residence for pregnant women, and buying medicine for a sick child.

Following the research, we facilitated structured synthesis workshops to collaboratively analyze findings, distill key insights, and design policy proposals to address the challenges the policymakers had experienced firsthand.

Technical Capacity Development

For both the government of RAAN and UNICEF, learning the principles and practices of participatory design was a key objective of this engagement. We emphasized technical skills building throughout the project by providing regular training, developing community research and policy design toolkits, and producing comprehensive documentation of the entire process in both print and video form.

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“[Participating in the research] made me acknowledge that maybe we need to visit more—it’s not just the business of monitoring. We need to give an answer.”

—Member of the Regional Council of RAAN Commission on Women, Family, and Children

The co-creation experiences left policymakers with deep and often surprising new knowledge of the day-to-day barriers that prevented their constituents from leading secure, happy lives. For example, in public health, while policymakers had made strong progress in improving the care available to mothers and infants, they realized that linguistic and cultural rifts often prevented the effective delivery of healthcare, leading mothers to seek informal services from inadequately-trained informal providers. The exercises also provided policymakers with new clarity on how these challenges could be addressed, such as by promoting better communication between mothers and healthcare providers, both formal and informal.

From these insights and many others, the government of RAAN developed a Regional Policy for Children that embraces and supports the diverse cultural heritages of the region. Among the areas the new policy addresses is increasing trust between expecting mothers and members of the formal health system. The policy is currently awaiting final approval. UNICEF has also since adopted this policy co-creation approach for similar exercises in other regions.